By Michael Carroll and Eugenie Bostrom
In 1964 – 50 years ago this month – Americans made a big commitment to the preservation of their public lands by enacting the Wilderness Act. This landmark legislation gave Americans a tool to protect the country’s last best wild places for generations to come, free from development and open for all people to enjoy. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act in 2014, we are recommitting ourselves to fulfilling our responsibility to care for America’s magnificent public lands.
The story of public lands, and specifically the story of the Wilderness Act, is not just a story of spectacular places, but one of people and the follow-through on a promise. From visionaries like Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall came protection for many of our most cherished places like the Weminuche and Lizard Head wildernesses. With the passage of the Wilderness Act came the promise to protect these special places as landscapes to find solace, unconfined recreation and connection to our natural heritage.
As the Wilderness Act turns 50, the 21st Century Conservation Service Corps – a movement of conservation corps across the country – along with supporting organizations like The Wilderness Society, have created a platform for serving these special places while building a new generation of responsible stewards for our public lands and proud leaders for conservation. This year the connection between the promises of wilderness, the lands the act protects and the public’s role come together in a program called Fifty for the 50th – a series of projects that demonstrate how the next generation will carry the torch to inspire Americans to care for their wild places. The Fifty for the 50th partnership between The Wilderness Society and the 21st Century Conservation Service Corps, including local corps like Conservation Legacy and the Southwest Conservation Corps, will improve landscapes from coast to coast including right here in San Juan National Forest, where the partnership will work on a reroute of the Killpacker Basin and a river restoration project in the Dolores River watershed.
This summer, Conservation Legacy’s Southwest Conservation Corps and local partners will have provided well over 65,000 hours of work on our local public lands. These crews rebuild trails, remove invasive species and reconstruct trailheads helping to ensure our access, safety and ability to enjoy our public lands and wilderness.
The young staff on the Southwest Conservation Corps and others like them who are completing similar projects on cherished public lands across the United States call attention to the ongoing effort to ensure access to our wild places while building connections to the great outdoors for a new, more diverse and more computer-screen-focused generation. With the celebration of 50 years of designated wilderness and the launch of this new 21st Century Conservation Corps initiative comes a reminder that public lands are here for all of us and are ours to care for across the generations.
When you’re out this fall enjoying these wild places with your friends and family, we hope you take some time to think about how fortunate we are to have an enduring legacy of wild places and young people who are willing to do the hard work to ensure that we can continue to access and enjoy them into the future. To learn more about the Fifty for the 50th campaign visit www.wilderness.org/fifty-50th
Michael Carroll is the national partnership director for The Wilderness Society. Eugenie Bostrom is Conservation Legacy’s director of strategic partnerships. They both live in Durango.
